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The Joy of Quack Grass

Enhance your problem-solving skills! Strengthen your ability to complete difficult tasks! Increase your will power! All this and more when you decide it’s time to get rid of that pernicious pest, quack grass.

Early this spring I stood with a farmer aquaintance, surveying a 10-acre field matted with quack grass. "How do you get rid of the stuff?" she wondered. It’s an organic farm, so that limits her options.

I decided to find out, and in so doing, discovered that quack grass, like most of us, is a mixture of good and bad. It can invade lawn and garden, field and nature preserve, outcompeting native plants and your favorite vegetables. It is also a prized herbal remedy, nutritious forage crop, and an emergency food source.

Like the dandelion, quack grass was brought to this country deliberately by European settlers. And like the dandelion, it greens up early in the spring, providing relief from the nutritional deprivations of the winter months. Yes, you can toss those early quack grass shoots into your dandelion-green salad!

How does your quack grass grow?

The grass itself can grow up to three feet high and will produce two to three dozen seeds per plant. The seeds can lie dormant for more than 20 years and can survive being eaten by domestic animals.

However, it is not the seeds that make quack grass the bane of gardeners and farmers. It is the rhizomes. Each rhizome has little hairy joints every few inches. Each joint can grow into a new plant. And one quack grass plant can produce 300 hundred feet of rhizomes in a year. So, if you run over a quack grass plant with your tiller, you will have dozens of plants where you only had one. Thus the Latin name, "Agropyron repens" — "sudden field of fire."²

Before we consider how to put out the fire, let's talk about its benefits, in case you should wish to tuck a bit into your tinder box for future use.

Stay healthy with quack grass!

In my reading, I found over five dozen medicinal uses for quack grass rhizomes. They are most commonly used for respiratory and urinary disorders, and as a spring tonic.

The rhizomes can also improve your digestion, as they contain a polysaccharide that can “...increase beneficial bifidobacteria within the gastrointestinal tract and eliminate bacterial pathogens.”⁴

If you’d like to add quack grass to your herbal pharmacopia, see the resources at the end of this article; in particular, Flora and Journey to Forever.

Hungry? Try quack grass.

The long quack grass rhizomes can be cleaned and dried and ground into a flour, a means of making bread in hard times. Or, roast them and brew them as a coffee substitute.

Raw rhizomes can be chewed as a quick garden snack. They are mildly sweet and extremely fibrous, so bring your dental floss.

You can also juice the rhizomes for a spring tonic, but be careful—all that fiber could be hard on your juicer. Or, boil them to a syrup and make beer.

And, as mentioned earlier, young leaves and shoots can be added to your early spring salad. The seeds are edible, too, but you’d have to be very patient to gather enough to be useful.

Improve your garden with quack grass!

Until recently, a strip of quack grass separated our vegetable garden from the alley behind our house. Since we were replacing our fence, it seemed a good time to rip out the quack grass. The root mat was so thick that the soil underneath was bone dry.

Now I’m kind of regretting the decision. Without that tough barrier, our garden is at risk of eroding during heavy rains, and I can’t think of another ground cover that would withstand a steady diet of snowblown gravel and car exhaust.

Quack grass can also be made into a slug repellent, although it’s more work than pouring a little beer in a pan. According to the Manitoba Gardener, quack grass “...damages the nerves of slugs. Chop it up and use it as mulch. Make a tea by cutting the grass up, soaking in one [quart] of warm water for 24 hours, then use as a barrier spray.”⁵ (The article warns not to use it directly on your hostas.)

Quack grass removal from back yard gardens

The best strategy is simply to dig up the plants. Choose a day when your garden soil is easy to work—slightly damp and crumbly. Loosen the affected area with a pitchfork. Don’t use a shovel, or you will end up chopping up the rhizomes, which you will deeply regret.

Gently loosen and lift the entire quack grass plant from the soil, following the rhizomes to the end and making sure you don’t leave behind any broken bits.

Don’t put quack grass plants in your compost until you are very sure they are dead. I put mine in the trash.

Hot water and mulch

You can get rid of quack grass using mulch, but the mulch needs to be impenetrable. Try laying newspaper on top of a layer of leaves and grass, and covering the paper with more organic mulch. Leave this mulch on until after you have harvested your crops; then till the whole thing into your soil. You will need to repeat the process the next year.

If you’d rather use a plastic mulch, use clear plastic, not black.6 The quack grass will be scorched by the sun beating through the plastic. After most of it has withered, cover the plastic with at least a foot of mixed mulch.

An ounce of prevention

Give your hoe lots of exercise. Every time you see a quack grass sprout in your garden, chop it off. After awhile, the plant will use up all of its energy stores and die.

If you are using your hoe, pitchfork, or tiller in more than one garden area, make sure you don’t carry bits of rhizome from one place to another. Keep your equipment clean.

Prevent quack grass seeds from infesting your garden. If there is quack grass in your lawn, keep your lawn mowed so it doesn’t go to seed. If you use hay or straw bales for gardening or insulation, make sure you get them from a clean source.

Large-scale quack grass wars

However, there are other things to try before you resort to poison. The most effective—and most time-consuming—method is tilling. Repeated shallow tilling exposes large numbers of rhizomes and forces the ones that remain buried to use up their food reserves. Till in warm, dry weather, as this will speed up rhizome dessication.

Tilling needs to be done two years in a row. Batcher recommends that, if you get too much rain to till in the second year, the area should be mowed or grazed to prevent the quack grass from producing seeds.⁸

Don’t forget to clean your equipment when you are done tilling an area full of quack grass.

Fighting fire with fire...and goats!

A safer and faster method is to buy or rent a small herd of goats. Goats will eat almost anything that grows. They will also add fertilizer to the soil, and till it in with their hooves.¹⁰

Geese are also effective weed-eaters. A young goose can eat its weight in grass every day. One breed of goose specializes in weed control, aptly named the Chinese weeding goose.¹¹

The politics of quack grass

In 1918, back when hemp was a legal crop, Andrew Wright of Wisconsin’s Hemp Industry noted that “Hemp has been demonstrated to be the best smother crop for assisting in the eradication of quack grass and Canada thistles...At Waupon in 1911 the hemp was grown on land badly infested with quack grass, and in spite of an unfavorable season a yield of 2,100 pounds of fiber to the acre was obtained and the quack grass was practically destroyed.”¹²

Until the laws change, the University of Minnesota’s Yard and Garden publication suggests a rotation of winter rye and crown vetch followed by buckwheat.¹³

As you begin your own personal quack grass wars, remind yourself that tasks like this are character-building. And if you figure out how to make quack grass beer, invite me over.

The many names of Quack Grass:

Latin: Elytrigia repens, Agropyron repens, Triticum repens, Elymus repens
Also known as: quitch, couch-grass, witch grass, dog grass, wheat grass, Scotch quelch, chandler's grass, devil's grass, quake grass, quickgrass, scutch, twitch, cough grass, and Dutch grass.

If you want to know more... Resources on quack grass:

• Batcher, Michael S., "Element Stewardship Abstract for Elytrigia repens var. repens (L.) Desv. ex B. D. Jackson," prepared for The Nature Conservancy, 2002.
• Cholewa, A. F., "Elytrigia," J. F. Bell Museum of Natural History, 2002. (< http://www. bellmuseum.org/plants/Grasses/grass%20text/elytrigia%201.htm>)
• "Controlling Quackgrass in Gardens," Yard and Garden Brief, University of Minnesota Extension Service, 1999. ()
• Curran, Williams S., and Dwight D. Lingenfelter, "Quackgrass Management: An Integrated Approach," Penn State College of Agricultural Sciences, 2002. (< http://www.cas.psu.edu>)
• Engeldinger, Eugene, "The Magic of Newspaper Mulch," Mother Earth News, May/ June 1980. ()
• Osentowski, Jerome, "[permaculture] Broadminded thinking?," . ()
• "Quack grass," Journey to Forever, .
• "Quackgrass and Its Control," Iowa State University, University Extension, April 1992.
• "Quitch (Couch-grass) Root," Flora,
• "Weeds, Friends or Foe?: Unusual Controls," Golden Harvest Organics,
• "What was said on CJOB?," Manitoba Gardener, July 9, 2006,

Notes:

1. "Controlling Quackgrass in Gardens," Yard & Garden Brief.
2. ibid.
3. "Quack grass," Journey to Forever.
4. "Quitch (Couch-grass) Root," Flora.
5. "What was said on CJOB?," Manitoba Gardener.
6. Jerome Osentowski.
7. Batcher, Michael S., "Element Stewardship Abstract for Elytrigia repens var. repens (L.)...."
8. ibid.
9. ibid.
10. "Weeds, Friends or Foe?," Golden Harvest Organics.
11. ibid.
12. ibid.
13. "Controlling Quackgrass in Gardens," Yard & Garden Brief.